A Simple Thing?
If someone had told me that it would take the better part of a day to make the portal face for the twin tunnels, I'd have said, no way; it's just a few pieces of stained stripwood. But indeed the portals shown below took hours upon hours of cutting, fitting, re-cutting, re-fitting, and so on, seemingly forever. It actually took considerably less time to assemble the truss bridge!
The lesson, of course, is that appearances can be highly deceiving. It wasn't just a matter of taking a few measurements and cobbling together some semblance of a portal, as I'd thought; each and every piece was cut to fit, often multiple times. (Note that the images make it appear as though the whole thing is wonky. This is an optical illusion created by the camera lens; trust me, all of the parts are aligned and square.)
It's all quite a change from my original plan, which was to use cast wooden portals from Randy Brown (far right, below). Considering the modification that would have been required, I'm not sure which option would have involved more work...
